PDF Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman Download
- Author: LeRoy W. Smith
- Publisher:
- ISBN:
- Category : Literary Criticism
- Languages : en
- Pages : 224
eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
An original critical introduction to women characters in the novels of Jane Austen. Why does Jane Austen “mania” continue unabated in a postmodern world? How does the brilliant Regency novelist speak so personally to today’s women that they view her as their best friend? Jane Austen’s Women answers these questions by exploring Austen’s affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines’ relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society. It reveals how, despite a restrictive patriarchal culture, these women achieve greatness. In clear, lively prose, Kathleen Anderson shares original theoretical insights from twenty years of studying Austen, and illuminates the novels as guidebooks on how to become an Austenian heroine in one’s everyday life. This engaging book will appeal to a broad readership: the serious student, the general lit-lover, and the Austen neophyte alike. Kathleen Anderson is Professor of English at Palm Beach Atlantic University and the coauthor (with Susan Jones) of Jane Austen’s Guide to Thrift: An Independent Woman’s Advice on Living Within One’s Means.
In her novels, Jane Austen used archetypes -- such as the mother, the sister, the shrew -- but let them develop into entirely new characters. Understanding the impact of detail is essential for appreciating her various novels. The merits of the film adaptations of Jane Austen's novels lie in the fact that they prove the many possibilities in the texts: the films are concerned with highly distinctive individuals. In By a Lady, the images of Jane Austen's female characters in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion are compared with their twentieth-century interpretations in film. The changes in the films' representations of the heroines are explained by referring to the spirit of the age: technical, cultural, as well as social developments have left their marks on the contemporary Elinor, Marianne, Emma, and Anne.
Originally published in 1992. In an age when genteel women wrote little more than personal letters, how did Jane Austen manage to become a novelist? Was she an isolated genius who rose to fame through sheer talent? Did she draw strength from the support of her family or from women writers who went before her? In Jane Austen among Women, Deborah Kaplan argues that these explanations are either misleading or insufficient. Austen, Kaplan contends, participated actively in a women's culture that promoted female authority and achievement—a culture that not only helped her become a novelist but also influenced her fiction.
Jane Austen’s minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed. Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austen’s minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries. Austen’s minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence. These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing women’s limited choices. This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.